Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate. Come to find out, all the Weird Letter Assignments have been reserved for ne’er-do-wells like himself. Shatsk, the notorious Leningrad nose-fetishist, who carries a black satin handkerchief to Party congresses and yes, more than once has been unable to refrain from reaching out and actually stroking the noses of powerful officials, is here—banished to the θ Committee, where he keeps forgetting that θ, in the NTA, is Œ, not Russian F, thus retarding progress and sowing confusion at every working session. Most of his time is taken up with trying to hustle himself a transfer to the Committee, “Or actually,” sidling closer, breathing heavily, “just a plain, N, or even an M, will, do. . . .” The impetuous and unstable practical joker Radnichny has pulled the Committee, being a schwa or neutral uh, where he has set out on a megalomaniac project to replace every spoken vowel in Central Asia—and why stop there, why not even a consonant or two? with these schwas here . . . not unusual considering his record of impersonations and dummy resolutions, and a brilliant but doomed conspiracy to hit Stalin in the face with a grape chiffon pie, in which he was implicated only enough to get him Baku instead of worse.